Guitar virtuoso Johnny Bellar will return to Vicksburg Friday to play a free concert at the Southern Cultural Heritage Center.

In his third performance at the center, Bellar will play classic country, bluegrass, gospel and original songs.

“I’m gonna share some personal aspects of my life, my health issues and some things that I try to relate to the music thing,” he said. “I guess you would say I’m reaching for the emotional aspect of things — make people feel something as opposed to just saying ‘well, he’s a pretty good picker,’ ya know?”

Bellar, 55, said he’ll also tell funny stories between songs.

“There’s a lot of that fixin’ to come down. The folks that already know me down there, they’re well aware of what kind of nut I am,” he said with a laugh. “If anybody else shows up, they’re gonna find out real quick.”

Born in Springfield, Tenn., Bellar began playing the guitar at age 14 and the resonator version a year later. He toured with the Stoneman Family for 10 years after he graduated from high school in 1974. He appeared with the family on such TV shows as “Hee Haw,” “The Ralph Emery Show” and “The Tommy Hunter Show.” Bellar also performed for three years with the New Tradition, a bluegrass gospel group.

In 1987, he chose to concentrate on his own music and worked his way into the Nashville studio scene. He has since performed on the Grand Ole Opry and has recorded 10 solo albums of original material.

Bellar plays several instruments but the dobro is his specialty. Developed in 1928, the dobro is an acoustic guitar with one or more cone-shaped metal resonators built into its body. The resonators produce amplification and give it its distinctive twang.

The name “dobro” was coined by the Dopyera brothers, the instrument’s original manufacturers, when they started the Dobro Manufacturing Company.

Usually played horizontally on the lap, the dobro was popular in country music of the 1930s before it was outdated by the electric steel guitar. However, the dobro has experienced a resurgence over the last few decades.

Watching the bluegrass musician Josh Graves play the dobro on television inspired Bellar to take up the instrument at age 15.

“I wasn’t interested pretty much in exactly how we was doing it,” he said. I was just amazed at the fact that it sounded different from the other guitars, and he was playing it different. It just got my attention and I guess I was destined to do something different from everybody else.”

When Bellar was 14 he would use a pocket knife as a metal slide to play his father’s Gibson acoustic guitar like a dobro.

After a year of that, his father had had enough. His father drove Bellar to Friedman’s Pawn Shop in Nashville.

“I looked up on the wall and there were three of them hanging up on the wall, dobro issues, the actual dobro brand,” he said. “He pulled up there and said pick you one. He just wanted to get that over with. He knew where my heart was.”

Bev King, a longtime dobro player and owner of Country Heritage Music, a Clarksville, Ark., store that specializes in resonator guitars, is recording an album with Bellar. King said she believes Bellar is the best dobro player in the world.

“Johnny can get more out of a resonator guitar than anyone I’ve ever heard, and I have personally met and watched nearly all of the best-known resonator guitarists in the world, and have picked with a lot of them,” she said. “His style is unique, due to some of the original techniques he uses, which no one else does — unless they are imitating him.”

Another thing that separates Bellar from other dobro greats is the amount of feeling he puts into his music, King said.

“Johnny is one of a very few that can do both the flashy fast stuff as well as the slow pretty tunes,” she said. 

“What he has done with his music has been a result of his own hard work and faith,” she said.